Fear-mongering

Tuesday, February 26, 2013

Ignore the economists. A cartoonist has cut right to the heart of President Obama’s hysterical hooey over the “sequestration” cuts. Ink-stained wretch Michael Ramirez, award-winning editorial cartoonist (two Pulitzer prizes), sums it up with two simple pie charts. One depicts the fiscal situation in 2007. The other depicts the fiscal situation in the Obama era.

2007 situation: 2013 situation:

$2.7 trillion spending $3.8 trillion spending

$161-billion deficit $901-billion deficit

The cartoonist’s graphic aptly depicts the $85 billion of sequestration cuts which have occasioned much hoo-ha as a little pile of crumbs next to the big spending pie, 2.23 percent of the pie.

Investor’s Business Daily, where we happened upon the Ramirez cartoon, puts matters in further perspective. It notes that the $85 billion or 2.23 percent of cuts actually refers to budget authority, not budget outlays. Reduced outlays are actually $44 billion (by Congressional Budget Office reckoning). And that sum comes to one quarter of 1 percent of GDP. The $44 billion of actual spending cuts — most of which come on a rising spending baseline — means we’re talking mostly about smaller increases in spending rather than actual cuts. The $44 billion is about 1.25 percent of current spending.

In stoking hysteria, the White House has raised the specter, for example, of laid-off air-traffic controllers, long lines on the ground and danger in the air. Investor’s Business Daily points to a DOT IG report that in 2000 the FAA handled 33 percent more air traffic with 3,400 fewer flight controllers than today. The IG observed that this “raises questions about the efficiency of FAA’s current controller workforce.” Indeed. Just one example of no doubt many.

This is not to suggest that the sequestration’s random cuts — an idea Obama came up with, by the way — won’t entail real fiscal disruption and inconvenience. It’s clear from the White House-orchestrated hysteria campaign that Obama and his Democratic minions are bent on milking the situation for maximum disruption and inconvenience rather than striving to manage the situation with the aim of minimizing disruption and inconvenience. As Obama’s former chief of staff used to say, “Never let a crisis go to waste.”